It was only natural that everything would instantly go wrong for me. One might say one of my many talents is making the worst out of an already bad situation. The cultivator followed behind me as we approached the sect's compound- glowing flowers dotting the mountaintop it was built into, casting their pale blue light into the darkness, contrasting with the warm red glow of lanterns hanging from the building's eaves. In the distance, small villages built atop pools of water looked like dim clusters of stars, suspended in the unbroken darkness of the forests and swamps surrounding them.

  The golden-haired woman never let me out of her sight, hands held behind her back as we took a leisurely stroll through the field. My arms, sore as they were from climbing, clung tight to the bag I carried at my side, the only thing approaching a lifeline in this situation. All I could do if things got dangerous was to reach for one of my more esoteric inventions- just about any cultivator that lived here could easily deal with clouds of poisonous gas, paralyzing venom or other common mixtures, but I'd always preferred to experiment where I could. Living in a world with even more of a class divide than my own hadn't stopped me from having a scientist's spirit, even if everyone expected me to be happy as a servant.

  Sure, a cloud of poisonous blinding gas is one thing. A cloud that looks like poisonous gas yet crystallizes when mixed with another compound into a far more... combustible state is another. I was weak, sure, but despite what the matron believed, I had accepted that. I just had to play with those expectations, if I wanted to eke out a victory somewhere.

  ...Or, in this case, cause enough of a stir for a hasty retreat. I was a failure nobody would bother to chase after, at any rate.

  "Tell me, maid girl." The cultivator beside me asked, casually. "How much do you know of the Border Kingdoms?"

  What a dangerously vague question. I did my best to answer accurately. "There's twelve of them, each headed by one royal family descended from the twelve heroes who aided in the rise of our Emperor. They're the territories whose borders keep away all the...well, the monsters, demonic cultivators, and suchlike."

  She nodded absent-mindedly, uninterested. Not the answer she wanted? "And here in your land of Weeping Seas, you've got plenty of that to deal with."

  I huffed, despite myself. "Foreigners always assume we're nothing more than a poisonous swampland-"

  The cultivator laughed. I went quiet.

  "No, no, clearly not. You've made the poison a boon, really, I always thought it impressive. Your Prince has always rejected help as well. I thought you were all just as stubborn, so I was quite happy you asked me for help."

  "...I can't deny we're very stubborn." I admitted. "It's hard enough to work this land, and diseases can be pretty common... We do a lot of work making remedies for them, here." Thinking on it, was this whole meeting about that? If the Prince had been fussy with sending exports of medicine to the other kingdoms, maybe the Emperor had decided to apply pressure. Still, we were only one of many sects under Prince Ancha's command, and only of middling rank. Why they'd send envoys to us eluded me, and that only made me more nervous.

  "Oh, yes. I have to imagine it's boring enough to make a grown woman cry, spending your days cleaning up and making remedies for fevers." She sighed. I pointedly didn't rise up to that bait, continuing in silence as we approached the entrance. She shrugged, pausing for a moment to look at me, eyebrow raised with an expression as if she was pondering whether it'd be funnier to ruin my plans or go along with them.

  "So, pray tell, what is your cunning scheme to sneak into a well guarded compound full of Cultivators who can detect your qi? I'd been wondering what my part to play was in all of this."

  "Originally, I was going to sneak in as cleaning staff and say I was sent up to clean a mess from one of the younger disciples, which is why I bothered with the ruqun in the first place. I even reverse-engineered one of the mixtures we're not supposed to know about from the ingredients in the glassware after their classes." I elaborated, dusting off the skirt and jacket with annoyance. "But you're expected to be there, and there's politics involved. The younger disciples won't ask any questions so long as I'm carrying a bottle and food for you. You've already met Lily, so she's involved somehow..."

  Why would she be involved? She may be a prodigy, but we were the same age. She couldn't be strong enough to be this important already, right?

  I gripped my bag tighter.

  "...This whole thing is a mistake." I muttered. I should've ran away on my own, made a living as an alchemist somewhere I could be respected.

  "It is." The cultivator cheerily agreed, clapping my back. "But it's too late to back out now. Cheer up, will you? You might as well make it a mistake to remember. Maybe you'll carry it on to your next life and do better!"

  The irony was palpable. Sighing, I stepped forwards, looking back at her. "The least you could do is pretend you're not in this to see how badly I fuck up. A little encouragement would be nice."

  She didn't reply, taking the lead as we went in, walking past the guards without concern.

  The halls of the inner sect's building were familiar to me. I'd been brought here, as a child- for just a few years, I'd lived here with my sister, studying arduously even though we were barely old enough to go to primary school back in my old world. Learning to read lead to reading scrolls long enough to wrap someone in like a burial shroud, learning to harness qi lead to tireless exercises- It was a constant struggle, the expectations of the elders heavy on both of our minds. They'd saved our lives, and they'd expected the rest of those lives in return.

  Back then, Lily had been the only one I could lean on. She believed I was her sister, and though I'd loathed lying to her, I'd gone along with it, because she was the only person there who didn't look at me like I was a failure when I failed to hold myself upright on a single finger for the 20th time that day. When I was punished without food for failing to finish a task on time, she would sneak into the kitchen to bring me some- when I failed to purify a poison laced into our meals through the sect's internal methods, she was the one to cure it in secret. We got into fights, of course, as siblings do- One time she'd decided to carry away my journals and place them atop the highest tree she could find by the mountain's base, knowing I could barely climb half that high- all because I'd messed up one of her recipes the day before while trying to experiment on my own. It'd taken me the entire night to scrape my way up the damn thing, and she'd all but smugly told me that she believed I could do it all along once I got back covered in cuts and scrapes. Despite it all... we were each all the other had, back then, with how intense everything was and with most disciples either jealous of the focus the elders put on us or too old to be much company to a pair of children.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  But I knew that she wasn't the sort of person to abandon me. To simply turn to her studies and forget about me. There had to be a reason she hadn't seen me even once, after I was thrown out to the outer sect's halls to live with the servants.

  And now she was leaving, and she hadn't even come to tell me.

  I followed quietly after the foreign cultivator, a tray in my hands carrying her drink, trying to steel myself for the confrontation. We passed rooms where people were meditating, drinking, talking- unbothered, giving us but a passing glance. Or rather, glancing at the cultivator, their eyes glossing over me as nothing of importance. If nothing else, my plan had worked out exceedingly well. We stopped at the gate to the inner courtyard, at last.

  "...So, she's here?" I asked, suppressing the emotions in my voice.

  "Mhm. Why, it's where she agreed to meet me, so I should hope so."

  Before I could question her, she swung the door open with a loud bang, pushing me in alongside her.

  The courtyard was a round field of sterile sand, almost pure white in its hue. It'd once been a garden, but the common sparring of disciples had necessitated some changes- the constant use of alchemy, poison and disease over centuries bleaching even the soil into something no life could find purchase in. Standing by its center was an achingly familiar face, the breeze gripping at her robes and hair- Lily's formerly black hair bleached the same white as the sands. Her skin had paled, bereft of the blemishes and imperfections I still carried- even her eyes had lost most of their original dark color, shining in the lamplight like gray steel.

  Her face twisted with anger in an instant as those eyes fell on me.

  "Beryl. What is the meaning of this?"

  "Why, I was busy finding a champion for our duel." The cultivator beside me stepped forwards, smiling. "It'd be unfair if I beat you bloody in your own home, Lily. I could never fall so low, it'd be an indiscretion."

  Lily's eyes pierced through me. "So you thought to rope my sister into this, to give an insult grand enough to befit your stature. Is this what passes for negotiation in the Red Emperor's court these days?"

  "Perhaps you would know what it is like at court if you bothered attending, instead of hiding about in here and refusing their summons." Beryl replied, shrugging as she put a hand on my shoulder. "The terms of our duel are still on. You shall come with me if my dear champion here wins."

  "Hey, I-" It was as if I was a prop, in whatever this was. I tried to interject- I just wanted to talk to my sister.

  "Ah." Beryl interrupted me. "I've done my part. You've gotten in- getting out, well, I may not be so cooperative if you don't do me a favor, miss maid. We can still call the guards."

  Lily stepped forwards, trying to master her anger. "...What a farce. You're taking advantage of her just to hurt me."

  "Oh, please. I found her talking about how she wanted to punch you." Beryl laughs, covering her mouth with a hand. "It seems you've hurt eachother plenty enough. I'm just an intermediary."

  Biting her lip, my sister finally went quiet. Still as a corpse, with nary a breath disturbing the air, she paused for a long moment- only the sound of the breeze on the courtyard's sands keeping away silence.

  "...Lily." I finally broke it, stepping forwards. I didn't know what was going on, and, frankly, I was at my limits with caring. "...I just want an answer. I don't care about...whatever this is, and you'll win anyways, but I just want to know why you haven't come to see me in all this years."

  "No, you don't. You should've stayed home, Maybell." She replied, shifting her stance- raising a single hand against me. "You shouldn't have gotten involved with any of this in the first place. Let's get this over with."

  "How can you say that-!"

  Before I could finish my sentence, she was already beside me, hand carving a gentle curve through the air like a knife. If I hadn't already been straining my eyes with qi to see everything in the dark, I wouldn't have even seen her move- and been defeated in a single blow. Instead, I forced all my energy to my legs with a painful grunt, the blocked flow straining my muscles until they burned as I turned on my front foot, following the angle of her attack and striking back. Without the power of my qi being able to reach my right arm in time, however, it simply slid off her cheek like rain. The gulf between us was even greater than I'd wanted to believe.

  "Don't humilliate yourself like this." She chided, turning her swing into a grab for my left arm.

  Of course, I'd already known I was far weaker than her. As she wrested my left arm with ease, I let go of the vial I'd grabbed from my bag- a small push of qi enough to rupture the glass into shards and release its content into a cloud of black vapor. The glass dug into my skin where it struck, but the moment's distraction was enough to slip loose. She could detect my qi in the darkness, no doubt- I couldn't sense her, but she must already have been moving for a followup strike, so I couldn't afford even a moment of hesitation. Breaking a vial against the ground, I keep most of my power in my legs, pushing it to my soles to retain my footing as it floods with some of the more 'experimental' soap I'd created- her swing thrown off by the slippery ground just slightly, glancing off my arm with enough force to draw blood instead of shattering bone. Faster, I had to move faster- another concoction thrown in her direction misses, catching the black vapor on fire as I leap backwards to get clear of it. She emerged unharmed, her cold glare aimed straight at my eyes.

  My sister's next strike disarmed me, the vial in my hand flying away as she struck my wrist- pushing my arms away and leaving me wide open for her palm to slam into my stomach, pushing poisonous qi into my body.

  Every part of my body went numb. The vial spilled its now worthless contents onto the sands as I fell onto my back.

  Beryl's clapping cut through the silence, her voice filled with the venomous pleasure of someone who knows they've gotten away with a crime. "Impressive! Wow. I almost thought you were going to take her head off instead, way you were looking at her."

  Lily turned away from me, not even tired enough to breathe heavier. "...Spare me your jokes, dog. I'll leave with you in the morning, but don't think for a moment I'll forget this slight."

  Beryl chugged the drink I'd carried for her as she walked over, smiling brightly, without a care in the world. "Wouldn't dare. Maybe in a hundred years you'll be entertaining enough to fight... Still, you can stay, you know. You did win."

  My sister looked back at my crumpled body. I tried to say something- anything- my body, my lips, my tongue refusing to move as I struggled to reach out to her. I expected to see disgust in her eyes- anger, perhaps, betrayal. Pity. Instead, what I saw was only sadness. "...I've got nothing left here to cling to. If the court calls me, I can't refuse forever, for the good of this sect."

  She closed her eyes, walking away. I still couldn't move, staring out into the darkness of the courtyard. How...dare she? Nothing left here? She was the one who'd cut away everything that kept her here. And I...

  ...Couldn't help but understand, even as it hurt. That look in her eyes meant something she couldn't say. Something she wanted to tell me. All of this- the Emperor sending a delegation over, the fact they'd asked for her specifically- that they'd sent missives, and she'd ignored them until they'd applied more pressure. She had stayed here until they'd all but forced her to leave. Perhaps that is what she meant, I thought. There was an answer, and it was not one I wanted to hear. She was in trouble, in some way- something she couldn't confide in anyone, with the visit being so unexpected. Even the elders must not have known all of what was going on, or they'd have been ready- or pressured her to accept faster. Which meant...

  "Well!" Beryl's voice shook me out of my thinking as she crouched beside me, leaning over my unmoving body. "How does it feel to hit rock bottom, Maybell?"

  I circulated my qi sluggishly around my body, trying to disperse the poison, but to no avail. I could barely begin moving the tips of my fingers.

  "Don't answer. I know." That smile. If anger had been enough to draw power from, I would've punched clean through her teeth, but as it was, I was forced to listen, my body burning with impotent fury. "I've been there, believe it or not. That's why I helped you, in the first place."

  She sighed, grabbing my face with one hand. Her yellow eyes stared into my own, studying them- satisfied with what she saw. The smell of alcohol in her breath as she spoke was nauseating. "Right now? You have nowhere to go but up. And I can see it in your eyes- in that glare you're giving me right now- that you're going to crawl your way there. No matter what it takes. You've got potential."

  The cultivator let go, standing up. "I'll be back in a year for you. Make sure you impress me then."

  In the end, I was left alone in the courtyard, to think on everything.

  No matter what... No matter what, I was going to punch that woman's teeth in, and save my sister from whatever mess she was in.